The £150,000 McLaren MP4-12C is Britain's answer to Italy's legendary Ferrari and is the long-held dream of boss Ron Dennis to produce an 'affordable' supercar with the greenest credentials.

Pulling off the dust-sheets to reveal the car were Formula One drivers Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

Using a one-piece carbon-fibre chassis McLaren plan to offer the car for around half the £300,000 price tag that would normally be expected of a car of this calibre.

McLaren expects to make up to 1,000 cars in 2011 with annual manufacturing of vehicles reaching around 4,000 by the middle of the decade.

The company plans to sell the 12C through McLaren retailers in 19 countries, with North America expected to account for around 30 to 40 per cent of the market.

With aerodynamic styling designed to keep it on the ground at high speed, the new McLaren two-seater will accelerate from rest to 60mph in just 3.4 seconds.
It is powered by a massive 3.8 litre V8 twin turbo engine which develops 600 brake-horse-power of pulling power.

^ That article compared the buld time for the monocoque to be 4 hours instead of 400 on the SLR (I bet that's man-hours of labour, excluding cure time). That's a huge savings in cost there. That combined with the modular building of the front and rear subframes and minimalist interior and you've got very small labour costs when compared to other hand-built super cars. And in any project, your labour costs are your biggest liability when compared to the actual material itself.

It looks like they went cheap on the stuff that doesn’t matter and added efficiency to the stuff that does. The perfect formula for an affordable performer. Is it as insane as the F1? No, but you can buy 4 of these for what the F1 cost. This is by far the type of car Gordon Murray would approve of compared to the bloated SLR (lightweight, good on gas, etc.)

i havent seen it mentioned anywhere, but is it just me that sees all the little detail similarities between the ferrai 458 and the mclaren mp4-12c (horrible name imo)?

it's like the two companies are involving some espionage & copying each other in F1 and road car development now

the fins in nose were not part of original mclaren design drawings, the center dashs are similar shaped, rear heat venting in same locations, engine intake at glass side-lites
though they do have very different diffusers